Current research

My research interests are in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British landscape and genre painting, with a particular emphasis on the representation of the poor and the relationship of art to its social and political context. I have curated exhibitions and displays at Tate Britain, the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, the Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, the Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, and Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance.

My most recent publications include Where the Sea Meets the Land, a book on images of the coast in the nineteenth century, and a monograph on the artist John Brett. My new book, Silent Witnesses: Trees in British Art, 1760-1870, has just been published by Sansom and Company.

Please see below for a full list of publications.

research students

I am currently supervising two research students:

Robert Wilkes (co-supervised with Dr Dinah Roe) is working on the life and work of Frederic George Stephens.

Mary Thompson is working on "The Elderly in Portraits in England and the USA, 1870-1910."

Former research students

-Dr Virginia Flew (co-supervised with Dr Matthew Craske) graduated in 2017. Her thesis is on "How the Culture of Exhibitions and the Print Market transformed Landscape Painting in the Late Eighteenth Century."

Dr Mary O'Neill graduated in 2016. Her thesis on "Paintings and Photographs of Fisherfolk and Fishing Practices in West Cornwall, 1860-1910" was an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral project, in association with Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, where she curated an exhibition: Model Citzens: Myths and Realities (14 June - 6 September 2014)Publication: Cornwall's 'Fisherfolk': Art and Artifice (Sansom and Company, 2014)​Dr Caroline Palmer (co-supervised with Dr Harry Mount) is currently Western Art Print Room Supervisor in the Ashmolean Museum.Publications:"Brazen Cheek: Face-Painters in Late Eighteenth-Century England," Oxford Art Journal (2008) 31(2): pp. 195-213."Colour, chemistry and corsets: Mary Philadelphia Merrifield's Dress as a Fine Art", Costume Journal, 47:1, January 2013, pp. 3-27."'I Will Tell Nothing that I Did Not See': British Women's Travel Writing, Art, and the Science of Connoisseurship, 1776-1860", Forum for Modern Language Studies, 51.3 (2015), pp. 248-68.With Colin Harrison and Katherine Wodehouse et al, Great British Drawings, exh. cat. (Ashmolean Museum), 2015.ed., with Carly Collier, "Discovering Ancient and Modern Primitives: The Travel Journals of Maria Callcott, 1827-28", Walpole Society, vol. 78 (2016)."'A fountain of the richest poetry': Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and the rediscovery of early Christian art", Visual Resources, 33. 1-2 (2017), pp. 48-73.

Dr Fiona Mann graduated in 2012 and is now a freelance researcher. In December 2017 she was invited to give the McDougall Lecture on watercolour painting at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.Publications:"Rossetti's Watercolours: Materials and Technique", The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol. XIII, No 3 (Autumn 2005), pp.19-29."A ‘born rebel’: Edward Burne-Jones and watercolour painting 1857-1880" - The Burlington Magazine, October 2014. "Lifting the ‘Universal veil’ of anonymity: Writers on Art in the British Periodical Press, 1850-1880" - The British Art Journal, Winter 2014-15.“’Shilling vade-mecums’: Watercolour Manuals and the Advancement of Watercolour in Britain 1850-1880”, in Christoph Krekel, Joyce H. Townsend, Sigrid Eyb-Green, Jo Kirby, Kathrin Pilz (eds.), Expression and Sensibility. Art Technological Sources and the Rise of Modernism, Archetype Publications, (forthcoming) April 2018.

Dr Nancy Langham-Hooper graduated in 2012. She is currently an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research is on John Rogers Herbert.Publications:“James Collinson’s For Sale and To Let: The Vulnerable Woman” The Review of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Vol. XVII, No. 2, Summer 2009, p62-68.."John Rogers Herbert (1810-90) and the New Palace of Westminster," British Art Journal (2011)"The Pre-Pre-Raphaelite: John Rogers Herbert, R.A. (1810-1890), The Burlington Magazine, May 2014.“Unrolled: John Rogers Herbert (1810-1890) and the monumental Moses in the National Gallery of Victoria”, Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, No. 54, December 2015, p71-81."‘You May See it or Not’: John Rogers Herbert, R.A. and the New Palace of Westminster ". Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion. Eds. Ben Quash, Aaron Rosen and Chloe Reddaway. London: IB Tauris, 2016. pp102-114."Edith Courtauld’s ‘Memories of the First Palm Sunday’", Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, Special Edition: Pre-Raphaelitism and Australasia, March 2018 (forthcoming)